The present invention relates to information processing method and system for automatically collecting desired information from a large amount of information.
As an information processing system for acquisition of information, there is heretofore known an information retrieval system which is so arranged as to make access to a database or a knowledge base in which information has previously been stored or accumulated, as is described in JP-A-60-140443.
Further, as the methods for retrieval of information, there are known a method in which the user designates items for retrieval in accordance with items of a table constituting a part of a database on the basis of information concerning a data storage structure adopted in the database and a method of simplifying designation of the items for retrieval by resorting to an associative retrieval and a synonym processing. Besides, there has already been proposed a method according to which documents added with keywords are stored as they are for allowing extraction of document constituent parts for which coincidence is found with the keywords and a method according to which a stored document is retrieved when the keywords available for the retrieval coincide with synonyms detected from all the texts of that document.
The first mentioned prior art method is however disadvantageous in that information other than the predetermined table items can not be processed because of the tabular structure of the database. If the number of table items is increased in an effort to cope with the above problem, then the structure of the database becomes complicated, involving difficulty in maintenance and management thereof.
In the case of the document retrieving methods in which keywords are used for retrieval, the requisite information as wanted by the user can be obtained only when the user having read the extracted document part can understand the content thereof. As a consequence, when information is to be collected for a specific item or matter from many documents, the burden to be borne by the user will increase significantly, giving rise to a problem.